Post-AWB Left Left Waving the Bloody Shirt

“The father of a 6-year-old girl who was killed in the Sandy Hook Elementary shootings will throw out the first pitch for the Texas Rangers’ home opener April 5,” espn.go.com reports. “The ceremony is part of a league-wide effort by Major League Baseball to honor the victims of the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting during the opening games of the 2013 regular season . . .

“All players, managers, coaches, umpires and on-field personnel will wear a symbolic ribbon patch and, with fans, observe a pregame moment of silence in their opening games in a league-wide effort to remember the individuals who lost their lives on Dec. 14 in Newtown, Conn.”

Quite why MLB is lining-up behind civilian disarmament is anyone’s guess. But one thing’s for sure: with a federal AWB DOA, gun grabbers are growing increasingly shrill. Check this polemic from nydailynews.com‘s Denis Hamil (complete with pic of Sandy Hook victim standing at the plate, as above):

“The morning of Dec. 14 was the last day I saw my son alive,” Heslin said of Jesse Lewis, 6, who was one of 20 children and six adults slaughtered in the Sandy Hook Elementary School.

“My son’s life was taken by a deranged coward with an assault rifle. I ask everyone to stand up and speak up for a ban on these assault weapons,” Heslin said.

The face of this father was a wreath of sadness as he stood in front of Vice President Biden and Mayor Bloomberg and other family members of the fallen of Newtown. But he wasn’t letting his boy die in vain. He was asking for some help from the American people to make the Cowards of Congress end the madness of assault rifles.

After the event was over, a mayor’s aide told me that Heslin was hurting as spring arrived because his kid liked to play baseball and the season was about to start.

It made me think immediately of walking through Newtown Cemetery back in December as funeral bells tolled through this drowsy Connecticut town that was awakened by a monster killing its children and their brave teachers with a weapon of war. As I strolled past fresh graves dug for children and gazed down to my left, I saw a sandlot baseball field as empty as the hearts of Newtown.

I knew that some of the murdered kids had played on spring and summer days on that field of dreams but never would again. Instead they would lie up here for eternity in a field of the dead.

Well, then, let’s ban “assault rifles”! Because, you know, death sucks. And little children being slaughtered sucks even worse. And we have to do something, right?

Arming teachers? No, no, no! That would be like adding a “goalkeeper” anti-aircraft system on Navy ships in case the enemy somehow managed to arm-up and penetrate several layers of security.

We need to do something to prevent these spree killings before they occur. Like making it impossible for them to purchase weapons. Well, a weapon. The AR-15. Which is an extra-special deadly weapon—that somehow got to be law-abiding Americans’ favorite rifle.

And as Heslin spoke in City Hall on Thursday I thought of another kid who loved baseball named Chase Kowalski, who was a star pitcher for a local Newtown team and how, when I walked into his wake, he lay in a closed coffin because the savagery of the AR-15 assault rifle that had killed him hadn’t left enough of his little 7-year-old face for an open casket.

This is the gun the NRA and the Cowards of Congress want to keep legal. A gun that blows the faces and fingers off children, that blows babies into caskets.

As Heslin spoke I remembered speaking to Chase Kowalski’s dad Steve in the back room of the funeral parlor and that his baseball dad’s face had the same stain of indelible anguish that I saw on Neil Heslin’s face in the Blue Room of City Hall.

As opposed to, say, any other gun. Which can also be used to blow the faces and fingers off of spree killers.

Every one of those Cowards of the Congress owes it to those who died in Sandy Hook to go take a stroll through the cemetery. Go with the parents who will be laying flowers on a kid’s grave instead of cheering for a son or daughter on that little baseball field down the hill.

“You don’t think it could happen to your kid in your town,” Steve Kowalski told me at his son’s wake. “But it did. And it can happen to your son as easily as it did to ours.”

I dare the Cowards of Congress to go there before they vote in favor of letting anyone have the right to bear a weapon of war. That’s a vote for another nut with an AR-15 to march into another school and kill more kids.

Meanwhile, rest assured that you’ll be hearing a lot from the civilian disarmament industry over the next few weeks. They are pissed. And they’re not afraid to bring out the big guns to express their displeasure. Rhetorically speaking.

comments

Mr. Heslin has become the poster-boy for the emotional anti-gun crusade, whether he knows it or not. I think he is being used as a puppet. Shame, really. I mean, his child is dead due to the madness of a crazy person, and here he is being used as a convenient shill by those who could care less about him, but moreso in love with the fact his son is dead so they can advance an agenda.

What? I don’t think he’s dancing on his child’s grave, and I think your assertion does more harm than good. He’s a state of mourning I can’t begin to imagine and he’s been manipulated by professional liars with false promises of snake oil that could have saved his child. If you can’t argue with tact, don’t argue with the parent of a murdered child. Argue with the ones lying to him.

Amen to that.
These parents are victimized all over again as political pawns. It is Obama, Biden, Feinstein and all their ilk who are dancing on the graves of these innocent victims to advance their political agenda.

This. Someone already said it. He’s being used as a puppet. what he’s trying to do is fill the hole in his heart in a way that makes sense to him. In a way that maybe will stop this from happening to someone else in the future. It’s not something I could imagine going through. I have no greater fear.
Now we both know he’s wrong. But get angry at the folks who are using him like a rubber and will toss him as quickly.

Any medic will tell you that a wound never heals if you keep picking at it. All these people are doing is keeping the families of these victims from being able to work through the stages of grief and come to terms with what happened.

If these children had been killed in a school bus accident caused by a drunk drive, would they and their parents keep being paraded before us by the media while they screamed for a ban on alcohol? Of course not. So I’m telling the AWB proponents what I tell the rednecks around here every time one wants to start wanting to waving a Confederate flag: “Your side lost. Get over it.”

i hate when people talk about the MSR like it is the only gun that can be used to kill a ton of people. virginia tech shooter had a 9mm and a .22 with a ten round mag. a columbine shooter had a double barreled shotgun like joe recommends everyone get. a ban on one type of gun, or all guns will do nothing to save just one life.

Timothy McVeigh killed 19 children under the age of six along with 139 adults and injured 680, yet we still haven’t banned ammonium nitrate and diesel fuel. Why? Because like AR15s, ammonium nitrate and diesel fuel have legitimate uses.

As far as MLB, I don’t necessarily equate wearing an armband to remember the victims with calling for gun control. As long as they keep it as apolitical as possible I don’t have a problem with it.

I agree, particularly with your second comment. I, as a gun owner and a parent, have grieved and want to honor the victims memory as well as I can. I’m not going to stop doing that just because some snake with use grief to their political advantage.

NASCAR did a similar thing for the Daytona Sprint Cup race. Michael Waldrip ran a Toyota that had the hood decorated with Newtown’s town logo encircled by 26 stars. They also publicized a number you could text to make a $10 donation to the victims’ fund. They highlighted it during the race, but didn’t make it the center of attention (Danica Patrick winning the pole position took care of that).

Interesting thing is that the MSM didn’t give NASCAR very much coverage of it, probably because NASCAR didn’t politicize it. But the MSM certainly has come down hard on them in the past few weeks.because the NRA is sponsoring the “NRA 500” on April 13 at the Texas Motor Speedway.

The liberal media rarely gives NASCAR any credit for anything because NASCAR is for the inbred rubes who live in flyover country. Baseball is almost exclusively played in New York and Boston and therefore has a strong liberal following. If you want to understand the liberal media you have to think like an elitist.

Yes, but. Ammonium nitrate is much more secured now. We learn to take the small steps to make it harder to do a bad thing.
Like, right now, in some states and some gun shows, and in the parking lots of all gun shows, non-background checked transactions can occur. No one thinks background checks will end all illegal purchases. But why make it easy for criminals and crazies to get inexpensive effective firearms?
Are you really for criminals and crazies to be able to easily buy guns?

The ammonium nitrate McVeigh used was enough to cover four and a half acres of farmland for a single season. I’m sure that if Joe Rebel went down to the local Co-op where nobody knew him that might be enough to arouse suspicion but maybe not.

I though we were talking about banning firearms, but since you brought up the subject, I oppose expanded background checks as well because 95% of those denied purchases of firearms are the result of false positives. That means for every sale legitimately blocked we deny the civil rights of 19 innocent civilians. If the government can’t do better than that, I’d say we should be talking about scrapping the whole system, not expanding it. And they don’t even enforce the felony of lying on the application. A convicted felon can try his luck and if he gets denied he’ll head straight to the black market without even worrying about being caught.

Not sure where you get your denial numbers. You can argue these numbers all you want, but I imagine the NRA has already. The FBI, last time I checked these are the good guys, say:
1) “The NICS Section achieved a 91.50 percent Immediate Determination Rate, surpassing the U.S. Attorney General-mandated goal of 90 percent or better.” So 90% of background checks got an instant answer.
2) “Of the 19,592,303 background checks processed through the NICS in 2012, a total of 8,725,425 transactions were processed by the NICS Section and 10,866,878 were processed by state users.”
3) “Denials issued by the NICS Section in 2012 totaled 88,479.”
4) “In 2012, approximately 1.01 percent of the firearm background checks processed by the NICS Section received a final transaction status of deny.”
5) Of those, ” In 2012, the NICS Section’s research resulted in the overturn of 4,020 deny transactions.” That is, a deny can be appealed.
6) Due to the three day limit, “…., if the final status (determined after the lapse of three business days) results in a deny decision and the NICS Section is advised by the FFL that the firearm was transferred, then the ATF is notified a prohibited person is in possession of a firearm. In 2012, the NICS Section referred 3,722 firearm retrieval actions to the ATF.”

The denial numbers above don’t include the state users accessing the NICS system. But 95% false positives? You’d think more would appeal…

McVeigh, Randy Weaver, and the Waco folks all believed that shooting guns or explosives is a correct response to government action, whether it’s a correct or incorrect action. That’s not “government of the people, by the people, for the people”, that is anti-government.

You made the claim that Timothy McVeigh’s inspiration was the NRA. I corrected you by pointing out that his inspiration was Ruby Ridge and the Waco Siege. I’m not defending his actions in any way, but he wasn’t the only person in this country who saw those incidents as a bloated federal government gone WAY out of control. I guess some people just don’t know how to channel their anger.

Newsmax quotes the above BoJ Statistics website: “As a report on these denials by the U.S. Department of Justice indicates, “The remaining denials (66,329 – 93%) did not meet referral guidelines or were overturned after review by Brady Operations or after the FBI received additional information.””

The Newsmax article says “To put it differently, the initial review didn’t find that these individuals had a record that prevented them from buying a gun.”

Well, no, Newsmax, that is not true. Please quit reading into the report what you want to see. The review found that the denials did not meet the criteria to be referred to the BATF for investigation and prosecution. See Table 8. ATF investigation of National Instant Criminal Background Check System (NICS) Index denials by the FBI, 2009

The report didn’t say what the qualifying criteria are. Table 8 has a footnote: “A denial is referred if it is likely to merit prosecution under ATF and U.S. Attorney criteria.”

Just because it wasn’t referred for prosecution doesn’t mean it was denied improperly. You all will believe what you want to believe, but don’t confuse your beliefs, or slanted articles, with facts.

To be fair, quoting from http://www.bjs.gov/content/pub/html/bcft/2009/bcft09st.cfm, in 2009, more than 33,000 denials were appealed (22% of denials) and more than 12,000 appeals resulted in reversal of the denial (37% of appeals). By may calculations, 12,000/33,000 * 22% = 8% of all denials were successfully appealed. So the false positive rate is 8% or more.

What causes false positives? Court records not updated, restoration of rights, restraining orders lifted, incorrect identities, incorrectly filled out forms, maybe even honest mistakes, and more that I couldn’t guess…

Read the reports above and make up your own mind. Didn’t your dad teach you to not believe everything you read in the newspaper?

Lying on an application to purchase a firearm is a felony. By your own statistics either 93% of those rejections turned out to show no evidence of said felony, or the DOJ selectively prosecutes only 7% of easily proven felonies. The truth is that, like the no fly list that Sen. Ted Kennedy found himself on, there is a better safe than sorry mentality where they would rather deny 19 citizens their civil rights than allow 1 to pass through the cracks. The 8% is the number of those who took on the federal bureaucracy and won. I’d be interested in seeing what the odds of getting off the no fly list is, but I don’t have the time right now.

But ignore the actual percentages for a minute. What if it were a different civil right being denied? What if a system was set up to keep illegal aliens from voting in which 8% of those denied their right to vote were denied without cause? You and your lefty buddies would be apoplectic.

“or the DOJ selectively prosecutes only 7% of easily proven felonies. ” I’m fine with funding all prosecutions possible. Let’s do it. Oh, did you starve your government last time you voted for no taxes? Thought so.

“But ignore the actual percentages for a minute. What if it were a different civil right being denied? What if a system was set up to keep illegal aliens from voting in which 8% of those denied their right to vote were denied without cause? You and your lefty buddies would be apoplectic.”

Gee, Gov, you are more of a lefty than I am… I don’t believe non-citizens should vote in US presidential elections at all!

I do think that timely denial of qualified voters is a bigger problem than a denial of a purchase of a gun. Here: &^*&*)&*&%&, I’m apoplectic. An election is one point in time, and it is over. Justice delayed is justice denied. A gun purchase is not as timely, hey, just use your backup piece…

You need to slow down and read more carefully, your comprehension skills are lacking. If 8% of natural born citizens were turned away from the voting booth because they had the same name as a known illegal alien, you’d be apoplectic.That’s how it works with the no fly list, and that’s how it works with NICS background checks. Getting your name off either list is a bureaucratic nightmare.

The only difference is that liberals don’t believe that individuals should have the right to defend themselves from lethal threat, regardless of the constitution. (You’re supposed to hold tight for 20 minutes until the professionals arrive.) So they’re hardly going to cry about individual civil rights being denied when it comes to the second amendment. I can’t convince you that the second amendment is anything but a barrier to be removed, so I was making a stab at making you understand how the other side feels. It appears I overestimated your capacity for empathy.

“You need to slow down and read more carefully, your comprehension skills are lacking. If 8% of natural born citizens were turned away from the voting booth because they had the same name as a known illegal alien, …”
Your writing skills have improved with this version, no possibility of misinterpretation.
But so has your skill with illogical leaps to wrong conclusions.

“Getting your name off either list is a bureaucratic nightmare.” The stakes for the (now) three different problems (background checks, voting, and the no-fly list) have different levels of consequence and importance to us all. They are comparable, only because you and I put different levels of importance on the consequences of each. Yes, we all should be apoplectic if anyone is being refused their legal right to vote. Wouldn’t you be?

Factually, “getting off” the background check mistaken identity merry-go-round is immensely easier than getting off the no-fly list. Unless any effort on your part is “a bureaucratic nightmare.” I’d rather err on that side of caution. How many times would that happen to someone legally entitled? Once. How many times do voters get to find out what a Republican secretary of state has done to make it hard or impossible to vote? If you live in Florida or Ohio, every election.

Gov, you don’t know how liberal I am. And you have fallen into a rut when you say “liberals don’t believe that individuals should have the right to defend themselves from lethal threat”. Just repeat, there are no absolutes. I thought the conversation on this list was a little better than prejudiced thinking.

So what you’re saying is you aren’t interested in stopping rime or violence or looking at root causes; you just think criminals need to overcome slightly greater challenges before carrying out there crimes.

Hey, I have an idea to prevent rape… why don’t we just have potential victims wear two pairs of underwear!

How about relating it to what we are talking about, instead of a different crime. You have a figurative or literal gun show, where FFL’s do background checks and private sellers don’t. Anyone can walk in and find the sellers that don’t require a background check. And buy a gun. Anyone can buy a gun from armslist. Anyone can answer an ad in the paper and buy a gun.

I’d say that’s just fine with me. If a convicted felon can’t be trusted with a firearm for his own personal self defense, he shouldn’t be allowed back on the streets. If he has nefarious intent he will find a firearm on the black market anyway, which is just about as difficult as finding an ounce of weed on the black market.

The way I see it there are a lot more good guys than bad guys and if everyone is armed the bad guys are screwed.

With all due respect to the families that lost loved ones to the killer at Sandy Hook he could have done much more killing. How? Most people have seen groups of kids waiting for their school bus. These groups of kids occur at the same time in a given area perhaps a block or two apart. Kids on one block don’t see the kids on the other block so if something happened to one group the other group wouldn’t be aware of it. By stealing his mothers car keys he could have, or anyone could have and can still kill/maim many more than he did. My point? Take away the good guys guns and the bad guy will just use a car,take away the cars and the BG will just use rat poison after getting a job in the school cafeteria. Just because you (a stranger) lost a kid doesn’t give you special status in my eyes, I wish it didn’t happen yes, but nothing else. So since some of them want to take away my guns that I can use in defense of my loved ones , they are now on the other side and I no longer feel any pity for them because they have lost their people.

I guess I will always feel pity for them no matter what they do or say. People who have had their babies murdered get to say anything they want and I will listen respectfully with closed mouth, even if I disagree with the message.

here’s the thing with prohibition-it doesn’t work. Proven time and again. Alcohol prohibition gave us Al Capone-that really turned out well didn’t it? The war on drugs was brought to us in the time when people were getting high but violence was not an issue-today people are still getting high, but we have seen a HUGE spike in drug-related violence. Banning firearms as well creates a situation where criminals are better positioned to victimize society. “If we can save just one child”………..Really…………Chicago and Washington serve as shining examples of what can be expected from a weapons ban……..

Those who would take away the rights of others (and thus put more people in harm’s way by taking away their ability to defend themselves) deserve no sympathy for anything that happens to them. I feel for the child, who may have possibly been able to grow up and break away from his father’s leftist brainwashing, but not for Heslin. F- him and all like him, loss of a family member doesn’t permit you to be a tyrant.

I couldn’t care less about the reasons people construct to be oppressive in order to soothe their damaged psyches. All I care about is that this person is willing to oppress and endanger the lives of others because of his own stupidity, weak willpower, or inherent carelessness for others.

After so long trying to defend a basic human right from those who would take it away, I’m through attempting to play nice with these scumbags. Screw ’em all.

The people in this country need to wake up. I’ve got nothing against remembering these victims of the shooting in Newtown but what about others; victims of the wars in the middle east at the hands of our government’s illegal wars or victims of fraudulent banking practices leaving families homeless? Are we doing anything about that? Is anything going to be done? They want to ban the common sports rifle, yet they won’t do anything about the other things that have a much larger impact on society. That and stripping our rights in the name of safety and many other obvious threats to our freedoms has stimulated the desire/need to bear arms.

Twenty children and the adults is a tragedy. But you want to talk impact. How about the tens of thousands of children that died last year while they were all warm and fuzzy protected in their mother’s womb until they were murdered. The latest stat’s I could find for just one year, from the CDC website, is quoted below.

So while the nation grieves, mourns and glorifies the twenty children of this recent tragedy, at least they had a few years to love and be loved. To experience the joys of baseball games and tea parties.

There have been millions of children that were created, and in most cases, that were never born (look up postnatal abortion). That experienced neither. Only to be discarded in trash bins. Now that is something to grieve over, to put on the hoods of race cars and wear as a patch on a baseball players sleeve.

If the parents of Sandy Hook children want to cry, wail or scream from the rooftops for their personal loss, go ahead vent. I would too. Just don’t do it in front of the camera’s. This was your child’s 15 minutes of fame, not yours. There are millions of children who won’t get even that.

The parents of Sandy Hook and others shouldn’t be standing in front of Congress and demanding that my rights to extend and defend the time I get with my children should be limited. Everyone should just be thankful that we get the years that we do with our children, apparently we’re not guaranteed even that. My .02

with respect i feel sorry for your loss but coming down here to texas.. with your anti gun agenda?….I don’t think your going to try and get us to change our minds on th 2A…that simple best you go try that in one of those BLUE states

No, no sense at all. But many people have bought into it. How do you fight it effectively? IMO the NRA needs to get a TV show,a weekly thing showing actors in life threatening situations and how by using their concealed carry or home gun they have saved their family and their own lives.

Last I checked we’re still in “Murica.” We use the Phalanx CIWS (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phalanx_CIWS) around these parts (and the rest of the world). Unless, of course, you were trying to find a sports reference to go along with the article. Then it’s totally ok. As far as the article goes, it seems to me that most politicians look at citizens as children who need protection from themselves and want to control their lives because that’s what you do with immature children. Where I differ is that I believe that we should educate and teach people how to think so that they can mature into fully functioning adults who are productive in society. We need more real leaders. Not people in leadership positions that can’t lead their way out of a wet paper bag. Stay Dangerous!

Additionally, if something like this occurred to me I would channel my grief and energy like Suzanna Hupp (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suzanna_Hupp) to overturn unConstitutional laws. And not be a puppet of the greatest enemies of the common man in America.

I hate crap like this. I go to a baseball game to watch a freakin’ baseball game and eat a $10 hot dog. Why oh why must pro sports leagues turn everything into a memorial service, moment of silence or politically correct parade?

I don’t need Bud Selig to remind me to be sad about the death of 20 school children, I can do that on my own, thank you.

Sports are just sports, nothing else. Nobody wants to hear social commentary from owners, commissioners, players or Bob Costas. They need to step down from their little pedestals and just play the damn game. I can hardly watch the NFL anymore because it’s become such a bloated farce where the games mean less than the half time shows.

I didn’t read the part where MLB was supporting civilian disarmament, just honoring the dearly departed like what NASCAR did. Maybe RF is seeing the CD bogeyman in every corner ready to take his tacticool gear. No wonder the grabbers think we’re paranoid, our self-appointed leaders are leading the way.

Why do libtards hate women so much that they make them use shotguns (which they have a hard time controlling the recoil of) instead of the ‘womans’ gun (an AR with low weight and recoil)? Do libtards secretly wish that women be raped instead of having the means of defending themselves and being the equal of men?
This is how you fight the libtards, by using their own emotional, womanlike tactics against them.